Compelling evidence that the Chinese were the first great maritime explorers -- not the Europeans. Rewrite the history books!

In 1421, the largest fleet the world had ever seen sailed from its base in China. The ships, huge junks nearly 500 feet long and built from the finest teak, were under the command of Emperor Zhu Di’s loyal eunuch admirals. Their mission was to proceed all the way to the end of the earth to collect tribute from the barbarians beyond the seas and unite the whole world in Confucian harmony. Their journey would last over two years and circle the globe.

When they returned, Zhu Di had lost power and China was beginning its long, self-imposed isolation from the world. The great ships rotted and the records of their journeys were destroyed. Lost was the knowledge that Chinese ships had reached America 70 years before Columbus and circumnavigated the globe a century before Magellan. They had also discovered Antarctica, reached Australia 350 years before Cook, and solved the problem of longitude 300 years before the Europeans.

In this fascinating historical detective story, Gavin Menzies shares the remarkable account of his discoveries and the incontrovertible evidence supporting them.

The system of international co-operation in the Antarctic has been evolving rapidly since the signing of the Antarctic Treaty in 1959. Inextricably linked to this co-operation is the question of the rational management of Antarctic resources. In this book Professor Orrego Vicuna examines in depth the legal framework - the Antarctic Treaty, sovereignty, jurisdiction and the law of the sea - as it relates to the exploitation of Antarctic minerals. This is fast becoming a live issue with the ever-growing potential for the development of these resources. The first part of the book examines the main characteristics of the international legal framework governing the co-operation of states in Antarctica, particularly in relation to resource conservation. Against this background, in the second part of the book, the regime for mineral resources is discussed in sufficient detail to identify the basic issues and interests which have to be accommodated in order to attain an acceptable convention. The final part of the book considers the important set of questions raised by the interest of the world community at large in the Antarctic: most significantly, the initiatives concerning a broader international participation under the auspices of the United Nations.

'This was much more than a bunch of guys out on an exploring and collecting expedition. This was a military expedition into hostile territory'. In 1803 President Thomas Jefferson selected his personal secretary, Captain Meriwether Lewis, to lead a pioneering voyage across the Great Plains and into the Rockies. It was completely uncharted territory; a wild, vast land ruled by the Indians. Charismatic and brave, Lewis was the perfect choice and he experienced the savage North American continent before any other white man. UNDAUNTED COURAGE is the tale of a hero, but it is also a tragedy. Lewis may have received a hero's welcome on his return to Washington in 1806, but his discoveries did not match the president's fantasies of sweeping, fertile plains ripe for the taking. Feeling the expedition had been a failure, Lewis took to drink and piled up debts. Full of colourful characters - Jefferson, the president obsessed with conquering the west; William Clark, the rugged frontiersman; Sacagawea, the Indian girl who accompanied the expedition; Drouillard, the French-Indian hunter - this is one of the great adventure stories of all time and it shot to the top of the US bestseller charts. Drama, suspense, danger and diplomacy combine with romance and personal tragedy making UNDAUNTED COURAGE an outstanding work of scholarship and a thrilling adventure.

Composed in a prison cell in 1298 by Venetian merchant Marco Polo and Arthurian romance writer Rustichello of Pisa, The Description of the World relates Polo's experiences in Asia and at the court of Qubilai, the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire. In addition to a new translation based on the Franco-Italian "F" manuscript of Polo's text, this edition includes genealogies of the Mongol rulers and nine maps of Polo's journey, as well as thorough annotation and an extensive bibliography.

Hans Staden's sixteenth-century account of shipwreck and captivity by the Tupinamba Indians of Brazil was an early modern bestseller. This retelling of the German sailor's eyewitness account known as the " True History" shows both why it was so popular at the time and why it remains an important tool for understanding the opening of the Atlantic world.

Eve M. Duffy and Alida C. Metcalf carefully reconstruct Staden's life as a German soldier, his two expeditions to the Americas, and his subsequent shipwreck, captivity, brush with cannibalism, escape, and return. The authors explore how these events and experiences were recreated in the text and images of the " True History." Focusing on Staden's multiple roles as a go-between, Duffy and Metcalf address many of the issues that emerge when cultures come into contact and conflict.

An artful and accessible interpretation, "The Return of Hans Staden" takes a text best known for its sensational tale of cannibalism and shows how it can be reinterpreted as a window into the precariousness of lives on both sides of early modern encounters, when such issues as truth and lying, violence, religious belief, and cultural difference were key to the formation of the Atlantic world.

What does it feel like to walk off the edge of a map? To emerge dazed, dying yet triumphant, from the Amazon? Benedict Allen's anthology of human exploration ranges across various terrains - hot and cold deserts, mountains and plains, jungles and high seas - and presents the words of those who, through the centuries - be they Vikings or missionaries, conquistadors or botanists - have set off into 'the unknown'. 'Immaculately edited and shrewdly considered . . . a hugely readable compendium.' Independent on Sunday 'A monumental feat of compilation and editing, and will satisfy every armchair traveller.' Literary Review 'A generous, handsome volume, that will provide hours upon hours of absorption and revelation.' The Times

As Bob and Mildred Lee, they amazed audiences with their death-defying motorcycle act. In reality, they were Bob and Mildred Restall, parents of three, who balanced their glamorous show-business career with a happy, stable home life. In October 1959, the Restalls embarked on the ultimate family adventure, as Bob led his family to the east coast of Canada to dig for the famous treasure of Oak Island. For nearly six years, they lived without telephone, hydro, or running water, while newspapers and magazines chronicled their attempts to solve the mystery of the Money Pit. On August 17, 1965, their quest ended in tragedy when four men died. This biography, compiled by their daughter, includes material written by each family member. Lyrical descriptions of nature, amusing anecdotes, details of the dig, and numerous photographs help to tell the story. This book is a must for Oak Island enthusiasts.

This is a study of the nature and role of science in the exploration of the Canadian Arctic. It covers the century that began with the British Royal Naval expeditions of 1818 and ends with the Canadian Arctic Expedition of 1913-1918. Professor Levere focuses on the imperialistic dimensions and nationalistic aspirations that informed arctic science, and situates its rise in the context of economic and military history of nineteenth and early twentieth century Europe and North America. Accessibly written and prodigously researched, Science and the Canadian Arctic should appeal to an audience of historians, environmental scientists, and anyone interested in the Arctic.

W hat happened in North America between Columbus's sail in 1492 and the Pilgrims' arrival in 1620?

On a visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz realizes he doesn't have a clue, nor do most Americans. So he sets off across the continent to rediscover the wild era when Europeans first roamed the New World in quest of gold, glory, converts, and eternal youth. Horwitz tells the story of these brave and often crazed explorers while retracing their steps on his own epic trek--an odyssey that takes him inside an Indian sweat lodge in subarctic Canada, down the Mississippi in a canoe, on a road trip fueled by buffalo meat, and into sixty pounds of armor as a conquistador reenactor in Florida.
"A Voyage Long and Strange" is a rich mix of scholarship and modern-day adventure that brings the forgotten first chapter of America's history vividly to life.

In this rich and fascinating history, Susan Schulten tells a story of Americans beginning to see the world around them, tracing U.S. attitudes toward world geography from the end of nineteenth-century exploration to the explosion of geographic interest before the dawn of the Cold War. Focusing her examination on four influential institutions--maps and atlases, the National Geographic Society, the American university, and public schools--Schulten provides an engaging study of geography, cartography, and their place in popular culture, politics, and education.

During the summers of 1792-4 George Vancouver and the crew of the British naval ships Discovery and Chatham mapped the northwest coast of North America from Baja California to Alaska. Vancouver's voyage was the last, and the longest, of the great Pacific voyages of the late eighteenth century. Taking the art and technique of distant voyaging to a new level, Vancouver eliminated the possibility of a northwest passage, and his remarkably precise surveys completed the outline of the Pacific.

But to map an area is to appropriate it - to begin to bring it under control - and Vancouver's charts of the northwest coast were part of a process of economic exploitation and cultural disruption. Although he and the other great navigators of his age exercised no control over the ideas and enterprises spawned by their voyages, their names have come to symbolize the consequences of European expansion - good or bad.

"From Maps to Metaphors" grew out of the Vancouver Conference on Exploration and Discovery, held to observe the bicentennial of Vancouver's arrival on teh Pacific northwest coast. Its aim is to bring to light much of the new research on the discovery of the Pacific, as well as to illuminate the European and Native experience. The chapters are written from a variety of perspective, and provide new insights on many aspects of Vancouver's voyage - from the technology Vancouver employed to the complex political and power relationships among European explorers and the Native leadership.

While it is no longer possible to 'celebrate' the coming of the European explorers like Vancouver to the northwest coast, their achievements cannot be overlooked. The charts, log books, journals, and specimens from the voyages of Vancouver and his contemporaries are important sources of information essential for the reconstruction of an image of the Pacific region and its peoples in the eighteenth century.

Robin Fisher is a historian and the former provost and vice president academic of Mount Royal University. He is the author of Vancouver's Voyage (1992); Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890 (UBC Press 1974, 1992); and Duff Pattullo of British Columbia (1991), among other books. Hugh J. M. Johnston is an historian affiliated with Simon Fraser University. He is the author of several books including Jewels of the Qila: The Remarkable Story of an Indo-Canadian Family (UBC Press, 2011) and The Voyage of the Komagata Maru: The Sikh Challenge to Canada's Colour Bar (UBC Press, 1989).

In the spring of 2007 the Canadian Forces and the Canadian Rangers, the regiment responsible for providing a military presence in isolated communities, set out on a treacherous journey across jagged sea ice and over steep and hostile terrain. Their mission was to travel over two thousand kilometres by snowmobile from Resolute to the Canadian Forces Station Alert, and plant a Canadian flag en-route at Ward Hunt Island. Author, photographer and filmmaker Dianne Whelan is the first woman to accompany the Rangers on this never before patrolled route of the north-western coast of Ellesmere Island. Walking in the path of the historic giants of exploration, they were the first to reach this destination in the High Arctic since American explorer Robert E Peary's famous voyage in 1906. Operation Nunalivut (the Inuktitut word for "land that is ours") pushes Whelan to her physical and emotional limits. There are some chilling moments, such as when her snowmobile catches fire or later when she plunges into a twenty-foot crack in the ice, but Whelan boldly faces conditions only few can imagine and makes history as the first woman to successfully complete the gruelling trip. In "This Vanishing Land" Whelan shares her personal journey and explores the tumultuous political history and global significance of the Canadian High Arctic.

Innocence Abroad explores the process of encounter that took place between the Netherlands and the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The "discovery" of America coincided with the foundation of the Dutch Republic, a correspondence of much significance for the Netherlands. From the opening of their Revolt against Hapsburg Spain through the climax of their Golden Age, the Dutch looked to America--in political pamphlets and patriotic histories, epic poetry and allegorical prints, landscape painting and decorative maps--for a means of articulating a new national identity. This book demonstrates how the image of America fashioned by the Dutch, and especially the twin topoi of "innocence" and "tyranny," became integrally associated with evolving political, moral and economic agenda. It investigates the energetic Dutch response to the New World while examining, more generally, the operation of geographic discourse and colonial ideology within the Dutch Golden Age.

Since the first sailing ships spied the Antarctic coastline in 1820, the frozen continent has captured the world's imagination. David Day's brilliant biography of Antarctica describes in fascinating detail every aspect of this vast land's history--two centuries of exploration, scientific investigation, and contentious geopolitics.
Drawing from archives from around the world, Day provides a sweeping, large-scale history of Antarctica. Focusing on the dynamic personalities drawn to this unconquered land, the book offers an engaging collective biography of explorers and scientists battling the elements in the most hostile place on earth. We see intrepid sea captains picking their way past icebergs and pushing to the edge of the shifting pack ice, sanguinary sealers and whalers drawn south to exploit "the Penguin El Dorado," famed nineteenth-century explorers like Scott and Amundson in their highly publicized race to the South Pole, and aviators like Clarence Ellsworth and Richard Byrd, flying over great stretches of undiscovered land. Yet Antarctica is also the story of nations seeking to incorporate the Antarctic into their national narratives and to claim its frozen wastes as their own. As Day shows, in a place as remote as Antarctica, claiming land was not just about seeing a place for the first time, or raising a flag over it; it was about mapping and naming and, more generally, knowing its geographic and natural features. And ultimately, after a little-known decision by FDR to colonize Antarctica, claiming territory meant establishing full-time bases on the White Continent.
The end of the Second World War would see one last scramble for polar territory, but the onset of the International Geophysical Year in 1957 would launch a cooperative effort to establish scientific bases across the continent. And with the Antarctic Treaty, science was in the ascendant, and cooperation rather than competition was the new watchword on the ice. Tracing history from the first sighting of land up to the present day, Antarctica is a fascinating exploration of this deeply alluring land and man's struggle to claim it.

On November 23, 1942, German U-Boats torpedoed the British ship Benlomond and it sank in the Atlantic in two minutes. The sole survivor was a second steward named Poon Lim, who, with no knowledge of the sea, managed to stay alive for 133 days on a small wooden raft. Finally rescued at the mouth of the Amazon River, Poon was hailed as the "World's Champion Survivor." He still holds the Guinness World Record for survival at sea.

Great explorers are known for their hard-earned skills and meticulously honed character traits which have made their astonishing endeavours possible. Valuable lessons are waiting to be learned from the feats attained by the most revered names in exploration – from legendary adventurers such as Ernest Shackleton to lesser-known figures such as Junko Tabei. Life Lessons from Explorers collects 15 of the most highly prized traits shared by those who have scaled mountains and traversed tundras, proposing how these could be applied to your own life, whether you are crossing Antarctica or battling a mental obstacle. Compelling accounts of the life and times of celebrated explorers, highlighting when they have displayed these traits are accompanied by remarkable images of the people who have travelled to the ends of the Earth, and the places they discovered.

New York Times Bestseller (Expeditions) * THE "MASTERFUL CHRONICLE"* OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE LEGENDARY LOST CIVILIZATION OF THE MAYA--AN "ADVENTURE TALE THAT MAKES INDIANA JONES LOOK TAME"* In 1839, rumors of extraordinary yet baffling stone ruins buried within the unmapped jungles of Central America reached two of the world's most intrepid travelers. Seized by the reports, American diplomat John Lloyd Stephens and British artist Frederick Catherwood-both already celebrated for their adventures in Egypt, the Holy Land, Greece, and Rome-sailed together out of New York Harbor on an expedition into the forbidding rainforests of present-day Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico. What they found would upend the West's understanding of human history. In the tradition of Lost City of Z and In the Kingdom of Ice, former San Francisco Chronicle journalist and Pulitzer Prize finalist William Carlsen reveals the remarkable story of the discovery of the ancient Maya. Enduring disease, war, and the torments of nature and terrain, Stephens and Catherwood meticulously uncovered and documented the remains of an astonishing civilization that had flourished in the Americas at the same time as classic Greece and Rome-and had been its rival in art, architecture, and power. Their masterful book about the experience, written by Stephens and illustrated by Catherwood, became a sensation, hailed by Edgar Allan Poe as "perhaps the most interesting book of travel ever published" and recognized today as the birth of American archaeology. Most important, Stephens and Catherwood were the first to grasp the significance of the Maya remains, understanding that their antiquity and sophistication overturned the West's assumptions about the development of civilization. By the time of the flowering of classical Greece (400 b.c.), the Maya were already constructing pyramids and temples around central plazas. Within a few hundred years the structures took on a monumental scale that required millions of man-hours of labor, and technical and organizational expertise. Over the next millennium, dozens of city-states evolved, each governed by powerful lords, some with populations larger than any city in Europe at the time, and connected by road-like causeways of crushed stone. The Maya developed a cohesive, unified cosmology, an array of common gods, a creation story, and a shared artistic and architectural vision. They created stucco and stone monuments and bas reliefs, sculpting figures and hieroglyphs with refined artistic skill. At their peak, an estimated ten million people occupied the Maya's heartland on the Yucatan Peninsula, a region where only half a million now live. And yet by the time the Spanish reached the "New World," the Maya had all but disappeared; they would remain a mystery for the next three hundred years. Today, the tables are turned: the Maya are justly famous, if sometimes misunderstood, while Stephens and Catherwood have been nearly forgotten. Based on Carlsen's rigorous research and his own 1,500-mile journey throughout the Yucatan and Central America, Jungle of Stone is equally a thrilling adventure narrative and a revelatory work of history that corrects our understanding of Stephens, Catherwood, and the Maya themselves. *Missourian *Tampa Bay Times

In "Perilous Paths," author George G. McClellan seamlessly combines history, biography, and story as he narrates the early history of our country's movement from the east to the west through the eyes of Robert McClellan as he experiences successes and failures along the way.

This story focuses on one small but important piece of the history after the Revolutionary War. It tells of real, rugged men like McClellan-a son of Ulster Scots immigrants born near Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, in 1770-who performed tasks in harsh conditions that would be considered dangerous, even foolhardy, today. Perilous Paths follows the footsteps made by McClellan from his youthful days as an army packer to his exploits as an Indian scout, army ranger, and spy. It details how he fought alongside Lewis and Clark, gained an education in reading and arithmetic for the army quartermaster corps, and then moved west to Missouri and succumbed to the lure of the unknown, entering Indian country where he trapped furs and traded with the Indians of what would eventually become the American Midwest.

Marking the trials, tribulations and hardships, this history highlights McClellan's independence of character, the hardships he faced, and his desperate survival against unknown odds with a rugged determination to succeed.

Of all the remarkable people who first opened up the rest of the world to the Europeans Columbus, Magellan, Vasco da Gama, Pizarro and Cortes Afonso de Albuquerque, governor of Portuguese India from 1509 to 1515, was one of the most astonishing. He was a commander of bold strategic conceptions, a far-sighted administrator and in addition a talented writer, whose dispatches to King Manuel contain a wealth of spontaneous narrative, description and pungent comment. Caesar of the East is a specially edited anthology, based on the original Portuguese texts, of selections from these dispatches, or Cartas , and from the Comentarios (Commentaries) written by Albuquerque's son, also called Afonso, about his father's career, with new English translations of both. In the introduction Dr Villiers evaluates the part that Albuquerque played in the foundation of the Portuguese empire in Asia, and Dr Earle provides a literary analysis of the contrasting styles of the Cartas and the Comentarios , where the father's informality and spontaneity contrast fascinatingly with his son's carefully contrived and highly literary narrative. Historical and geographical notes help the reader to understand the text.

What does it mean to be an explorer in the twenty-first century? Explorer is the story of what first led Benedict Allen to head for the farthest reaches of our planet - at a time when there were still valleys and ranges known only to the remote communities who inhabited them. It is also the story of why, thirty years later, he is still exploring. It's the story of a journey back to a clouded mountain in New Guinea to find a man called Korsai who had once been a friend, and to fulfil a promise made as young men. It is also a story of what it is to be 'lost' and 'found'. Honest, sensitive and packed with insight, in Explorer Allen considers the lessons he has learnt from his numerous expeditions - most importantly, from the communities he has encountered and that he has spent so much of his life immersed in. 'To me personally, exploration isn't about planting flags, conquering Nature, or going somewhere in order to make a mark - it's about the opposite. It's about opening yourself up, allowing yourself to be vulnerable, and letting the place and people make their mark on you.'